It's the Return to Glory, Charlie Brown!

Once again, my beloved alma mater has trounced the once proud Notre Dame fighting Irish on the gridiron, perpetuating a recent tradition. In response to an exceedingly irritating segment of the Notre Dame fan base, which has taken to labeling Boston College as Fredo, I have meditated upon the situation and come up with my own analogy for Notre Dame football and their fans: the Great Pumpkin and Linus.

Much like Linus, the ND fan base suffers form a painful annual delusion: the rise of their football program. The fans argue that this year will be their "Return to Glory," and proclaim their faith in this inevitable destiny. Smug, entitled, sometimes crude, they look down their noses at all other programs who have "temporarily" unseated their Great Pumpkin, who will rise from their pumpkin patch in South Bend and bring a national title to Touchdown Jesus. Clinging to their impressive and, in many ways, unmatched history of success, the fans fervently wait for the resurrection that never comes.

Once their Great Pumpkin fails to materialize, they begin to equivocate with the standard refrains of every disappointed fan base, blaming coaches, players, the "loose" standards at other schools, or (my personal favorite) that every other team on their schedule treats their game as their Super Bowl, and somehow musters their best 60 minutes.

Give it a rest folks. Accept that, for this season and the foreseeable future, there will be no national title. Notre Dame has the potential to return to the top ten, and even to play at a high level, but there could be another generation spent waiting in the pumpkin patch before they play for a national title.

Bin Laden shifts his focus

The Charles Manson of mass murderers, Osama Bin Laden, has put Arab leaders in his cross hairs. The tactical vitriol stems from his strategic focus away from condemnation of the United States in favor of Israel. This represents Bin Laden's most recent exhortation to the Arab populace that identifies the Palestinian-Israeli struggle as the most important theater in the larger extremist agenda.

Why the shift in focus? One frightening possibility is that Bin Laden has become so safe in his current environs that he can target Israel rather than concentrating his efforts on self-preservation and beating the war drums against the US.

Take off that shirt: Che Guevara sucked!

The ubiquitous image of Ernesto "Che" Guevara adorns a panoply of commercial products these days: t-shirts, banners, hats, even coffee mugs. Snarky political commentators correctly point out two things (in between patting their own back): 1) the majority of those wearing/purchasing this merchandise don't know the second thing about him (they know the first, "rebel"); 2) as an ardent Marxist, he would greet this phenomena similar to a Pope discovering that his face was on currency in hell.

Guevara is rightly portrayed as an anti-establishment rebel that fought against perceived injustices. More educated adherents to his cult of personality know of his strong Marxist beliefs and consequent abhorrence of all things capitalistic. These same fools, undoubtedly surf the web in affluence, a position that no Marxist can reconcile, lest it be he that enjoys the affluence.

Guevara is often cast as a paragon of virtue; a man who died loyal to his values of revolution and "power to the people." Unfortunately for many Cubans, Che's values had a price: their lives. In carrying out the bloody Cuban revolution, Che advocated guerrilla warfare. Upon the disposition of the Batista regime, Che was elevated by his comrade Fidel Castro to serve as "supreme prosecutor." In this role, he presided over the executions of over one hundred in the Batista regime without regard for due process. Functioning as the sword of Castro, though under the "legitimate" aegis of the judiciary, Che's role was no less despotic than his former tormentors. Surely no social justice was meted out by virtue of his farcical foray into justice. Guevara was a man who did not compromise: "the enemy" was to be hated. This point is best illustrated by considering his claim that had the Cubans gained control of the nuclear arms present in Cuba during the missile crisis, he would have launched them.

Consigned to an ignominious death at the hands of the CIA and the Bolivian regime, Che's bitter tears are boiling on his face in hell. His "philosophy" has proved a failure; communism has been nearly eradicated from the globe, with those surviving regimes either drifting quickly towards capitalism (China) or totalitarian to the core in line with Batista (DPRNK). His message of hate and Marxism has been drowned out by his thriving t-shirt industry. He is the political version of James Dean's rebel, not without a cause, but who's cause has been obscured.